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FILM; Is That Ticking (Pause) a Bomb?

KNOWING that Alfred Hitchcock never previewed his movies, nor even saw them with audiences after they were released, I asked him in 1963 (when he was 64), if he didn't ever miss hearing them scream.

''No,'' he told me with a tiny smile, ''I can hear them when I'm making the picture.''

The question was posed while I was preparing for the Museum of Modern Art's first retrospective of Hitchcock's films in the United States, and his answer seems all the more revealing and relevant today, nearly two decades after his death, as the museum begins, on Friday, its second, and more comprehensive, retrospective. This four-month commemoration of Hitchcock's centennial will present more than 50 feature films, several shorts, documentaries, a gallery exhibition and even a Web site. Probably the most famous director in movie history, Hitchcock had a name that remains a synonym not only for suspense but for an entire film genre.

His response to me hints as well of his reticence and fear of any sort of confrontation; after all, what if they didn't scream? But it also puts into a nutshell his essential method: He made his pictures first entirely in his head, then put them (with numerous writers) on paper, then shot them. He used to say he entered ''the area of compromise'' only when he entered the soundstage, so naturally that means the movies he made in his head were far more satisfying to him than the ones he actually had to complete with all those intangibles, like actors. Another time I asked if it was true that he'd once said, ''Actors are cattle,'' and he replied, ''No, I said they should be treated like cattle.'' Later, he amended himself further, saying that many ''actors are children, and they're temperamental, and they need to be handled gently and sometimes'' -- a pause for emphasis -- ''slapped!'' But one way or another, he really didn't particularly enjoy the working process, didn't like the power actors automatically had and was often disappointed in a picture's result, feeling that it had been miscast because of either producer or studio interference. He once told me that Walt Disney, as a cartoon maker, had ''the best casting: if he doesn't like an actor he just tears him up!''

Certainly that's what ''the master of suspense'' would have done to Paul Newman on ''Torn Curtain'' (1967). Coming to visit during shooting, I found Hitch sitting in his tall director's chair in a mood of quiet outrage. What was the matter? I asked. ''Paul Newman sent me a memo,'' he said acidly, as if it might as well have been a letter bomb. A memo about what? ''The script!'' He was indignant. The four-page missive had evidently dealt with all the actor's questions or misgivings, complaining about numerous things in the screenplay and how these would affect his character. ''His character!'' Hitch muttered under his breath. ''I thought to myself: 'What does it matter about your character? It's just going to be Paul Newman anyway.' '' The fact that Mr. Newman was known to write memos -- I recalled Otto Preminger telling me of the Newman memo he got on ''Exodus'' -- did nothing to placate Hitchcock. His was not, after all, any picture. More than whatever insult or irritation the actor's notes gave, it was Hitchcock's having to respond in some way that galled and even, I think, frightened him.

But he had a positive detestation of any sort of authority, perhaps dating back to that terrible moment when he was 5 years old and his father -- to punish the boy for some infraction -- sent young Alfred down to the father's friend, the chief of police, with a note asking that the boy be put in a jail cell for five minutes to teach him a lesson. Five minutes can be an eternity. This was long before the days of identified child abuse, and Hitch himself told the story only to explain his lifelong fear of the police. Certainly that trauma would have been more far-reaching. Though he eventually endured the strictest education -- from Jesuit teachers -- and though he said this helped him to be extremely orderly and organized in his thinking, there was nevertheless the other, wild, side of the man, the one that drove him to make audiences suffer in suspense, that made him irritable and contemptuous of any power over him. His longstanding friendship, and immensely profitable business relationship, with the super-agent and Universal studio mogul Lew Wasserman never stopped him from making snide or sarcastic comments to me about ''the front office,'' even when that office was clearly Wasserman's.

Naturally, there were many co-workers he admired, even a number of actors he cared for and enjoyed. Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Roscoe Lee Browne were some he spoke of with special fondness. Back in the 60's, Grant had told me that Hitchcock was ''very patient,'' and illustrated this with an anecdote about making ''Notorious'' in 1946. Evidently, Ingrid Bergman had come on the set one morning and was simply out of it. ''We went over and over the scene,'' Grant said, ''and she was in some sort of haze. You know, she just wasn't there. But Hitch, he didn't say anything. He just sat there next to the camera, pulling on his cigar. Finally, around 11 A.M., I began to see in Ingrid's eyes that she was starting to come around. And for the first time all morning, the lines were coming out right. And just then Hitchcock said, 'Cut.' And I thought, What on earth is he stopping for now? Hitch just sat and looked up at Ingrid and said, quietly, 'Good morning, Ingrid.' ''

Though certainly he was enormously successful -- his name a household word in England in the 30's, in America from the mid-40's, and an instantly recognizable personage from the mid-50's when his popular television series began its 11-year run -- Hitchcock often recalled the sting of certain critical remarks. And he never concealed his resentment for being continually overlooked by the Oscars. When he was finally given a conciliatory Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for his body of work by the academy, he quite pointedly (and amusingly) made -- after a standing ovation -- the shortest speech in academy history: ''Thank you,'' he said and walked right off. When, several years after its release, I mentioned how delightfully satiric I felt ''North by Northwest'' was, he recalled with an annoyed incredulity that the critic for The New Yorker had referred to the movie as ''unconsciously funny.'' In fact, Hitch was always extremely sensitive to any kind of criticism -- another form of confrontation.

It's worth recalling, in this regard, that perhaps no other major film director had so often been written off by critics, and generally taken so lightly and so much for granted through most of his career. After his third English feature, ''The Lodger'' (1926), established him as a talent to be reckoned with -- he liked to quote the headline that appeared over one review: ''Young Man With Master Mind'' -- his next six pictures were dismissed out of hand. After ''Blackmail'' (1929) became his and England's first talkie and a big success, again his next six were used as examples of his deterioration. A return to form with the original ''The Man Who Knew Too Much'' (1934) followed by probably his best British film, ''The 39 Steps'' (1935), still did not stop critics from counting him out for his next three; or, after his extremely popular film ''The Lady Vanishes'' (1938), from saying he had sold out by going to Hollywood (in 1939), or subsequently from comparing unfavorably all his American work to the British beginnings.

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In the early 50's, when the French New Wave enthroned him in their pantheon, and later, when English-language critics like Andrew Sarris here or Robin Wood in London or in the Modern's monograph I prepared said that Hitchcock's American work was more mature, complex, challenging and far superior to the British, this was anything but common wisdom. Indeed, the opinion was considered highly unorthodox. What! Commercial Hollywood product like ''Foreign Correspondent'' (1941), ''Shadow of a Doubt'' (1944), ''Notorious'' (1946), ''Strangers on a Train'' (1951), ''Rear Window'' (1954), ''To Catch a Thief'' (1955), the remake of ''The Man Who Knew Too Much'' (1956), ''North by Northwest'' (1959), ''Psycho'' (1960) better than the precious, artistic British films? Impossible: the American Hitchcock was just a clever entertainer, not to be taken seriously. Actually, it wasn't until Francois Truffaut's marathon interview book, ''Hitchcock,'' published in the United States in 1967, that the establishment view began to shift, and the deeper, more ambiguous and troubling resonance of his work began to be understood. It was, however, almost the end of his career; he made only three more films.

Truffaut's book had a much better title in France, the literal translation being ''The Cinema According to Hitchcock'' (as in ''The Gospel According to . . . '') and, in fact, Hitch could have been an extraordinarily brilliant professor, which is the attitude he adopted with disciples like Truffaut and me: he seemed to derive pleasure laying down his view of the way movies should be made, what was good cinema and what wasn't. And his advice, his perceptions, his basic rules all made an enormous impact on Truffaut as they did on me and many others. Would that more filmmakers today had his passion for precision and paid attention to what Hitchcock put forth so clearly about the craft of this art.

HIS famous maxim, for example, about the superiority of suspense over shock reverberates into every aspect of picture-making and is today the single least heeded and most needed. As he once explained it to me: ''We come to our old analogy of the bomb. You and I sit here talking. We're having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn't mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! A bomb goes off and the audience is shocked -- for 15 seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, show that a bomb has been placed there, establish that it's going to go off at 1 P.M. -- it's now a quarter of one, ten of one -- show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. Look under the table! You fool! Now the audience is working for 10 minutes, instead of being surprised for 15 seconds.''

Another well-known, yet generally misunderstood, rule of Hitchcock's has nevertheless become fairly proverbial in the picture business -- the MacGuffin (which got its name from an old English shaggy-dog joke). ''A MacGuffin is something that the characters worry about but that the audience does not. You've got to have it in a spy story, but it really doesn't matter. In 'North by Northwest,' I sort of bleached it out to its minimum. Cary Grant says, 'What's this man up to?' And Leo G. Carroll answers, 'Well, let's say he's an importer and exporter. What of? Government secrets.' That was enough. But a lot of people think the MacGuffin is the most vital thing in a picture -- and it's the least important.''

He was at his most exciting, most riveting, describing sequences he planned to shoot -- so vividly that you could see the scenes, shot for shot, as he took you through them. Even if he'd already made the film years before, his unbridled enthusiasm for the visual, as he spoke of its how and why, was contagious. His eyes would sparkle, his large hands molding the shape of each frame, his intonation sharp and evocative. You couldn't help being swept along by the palpable joy of his telling. He would become a wonderfully mischievous boy at those times, the years slipping away to reveal a true child of the movies, born to be a crucial part of this amazing new medium that was almost exactly as old as he was.

My own favorite memory of Hitchcock comes from an incident at the St. Regis Hotel in New York in 1964. After some frozen daiquiris had left me a bit tipsy and Hitch quite red-faced and cheerful, we got on the elevator at the 25th floor and rode in silence to the 19th, where, when three people dressed for the evening entered, he suddenly turned to me and said, ''Well, it was quite shocking, I must say there was blood everywhere!'' I was confused, thinking that because of the daiquiris I'd missed something, but he just went right on: ''There was a stream of blood coming from his ear and another from his mouth.'' Of course, everyone in the elevator had recognized him but no one looked over. Two more people from the 19th floor entered as he continued: ''Of course, there was a huge pool of blood on the floor and his clothes were splattered with it. Oh! It was a horrible mess. Well, you can imagine . . . '' It felt as if no one in the elevator, including me, was breathing. He now glanced at me, I nodded dumbly, and he resumed: ''Blood all around! Well, I looked at the poor fellow and I said, 'Good God, man, what's happened to you?'' And then, just as the elevator doors opened onto the lobby, Hitchcock said, ''And do you know what he told me?'' and paused. With reluctance, the passengers now all moved out of the elevator and looked anxiously at the director as we passed them in silence. After a few foggy moments, I asked, ''So what did he say?'' And Hitch smiled beatifically and answered, ''Oh, nothing -- that's just my elevator story.''

Correction: May 23, 1999

An article on April 11 about Alfred Hitchcock misspelled the surname of an actor of whom Hitchcock spoke highly in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich. A reader pointed out last week that he is Roscoe Lee Brown, not Browne.

Correction: June 6, 1999

A correction in this section on May 23, referring to an April 11 article about Alfred Hitchcock, was published in error. The name of an actor about whom Hitchcock spoke highly was correct in the original article -- Roscoe Lee Browne, not Brown.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 1999, on Page 2002015 of the National edition with the headline: FILM; Is That Ticking (Pause) a Bomb?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe